Islam can only be modernized from within. If I state that I condemn the practice of stoning, that this punishment is despicable, it changes nothing. My fellow Muslims will say: Brother Tariq, you became a European, a Swiss citizen, so you are no longer one of us.

Don’t nurture a sense of guilt; rather, nurture a sense of responsibility married with a sense of humility.

To live is to love,to serve, to forgive. Love the One, love and serve humanity. To learn to love oneself and to love is to learn to forgive

As Muslims, we are all equals, we abide by the laws and we understand that we have to be active citizens wherever we are. Our goals are first to live by our principles, to remind people of these values, to reconcile our respective societies with these shared universal values and to try our best to push for a spiritual agenda with more ethics in society, in politics, in economics, and in culture.

It's okay to feel the need for protection if there is a real external threat. But to feel protective from the inside, it's a kind of jail: you get so protective that you cannot get out of the box.

I keep on repeating something told to me by an American psychologist: "When you are making a joke about someone and you are the only one to laugh, it is not a joke. It is a joke only for yourself." If people are making a joke they have the right to laugh at me but I will ignore them. Ignoring doesn't mean that you don't understand. You understand it so much that you don't want to react.

Saying that the origin of the Islamic State (IS) is within the Muslim Brotherhood organisation only strengthens IS.